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156 Pacific World hood” requires the quite heretical assumption that there is an inherent ontological dichotomy between the two. Indeed, one could say that the entire Mahayana tradition—back to the earliest sutras of Prajñāpāramitā and the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā of Nāgārjuna—rests on the insistence that, from the level of perception characteristic of a Buddha, there is no ontological dichotomy between anything and anything else. Therefore, in the Perfection of Wisdom, one already has buddhatā—the state or condition of being a Buddha—and must merely engage in such intellection or religious practice that might be necessary for the practitioner’s mistaken belief that he or she is not already the Buddha to be eliminated. The sword of Māñjuśrī, which cuts through that illusion, is nothing other than Prajñāpāramitā itself. Let us go further, into Pure Land thought. Hōnen insisted that in our unfortunate age of mappō—the last days of the truth—the subtly nuanced practices of earlier Buddhist traditions cannot truly be expected to result in the soteriological result that may have been quite possible in earlier days. For Hōnen, it was not so much that such earlier practices—including visualizational meditations—were false, or even theoretically inferior. For him, the issue is merely that we are now living under a state of emergency, in which it would be foolish to try to rely upon any soteriological model or practice other than the “single-practice nembutsu.” We can simply take comfort in the blessed reliability of the salvific power of that nembutsu, which Amida established for us to use in case of need, such as ours today. For other Buddhists of his day, however, such thinking seemed to undercut certain ideas of practice that were soteriologically essential, if not actually necessary, to qualify as a practitioner of Buddhism in the first place. I shall leave it to others to take these issues further into the subtleties of Pure Land thought. We all know that Shinran, for instance, assumed the soteriological necessity of trusting ourselves to tariki, for the ōjō or “rebirth in the Pure Land” provided by Amida is not to be attained by means of any personal practice: it already inheres within all sentient beings as shinjin, which has been instilled in all of us by virtue of the “Original Vow” of Amitābha. So we do not actually transform reality, or even our own human reality, by our practice of nembutsu. Perhaps, in a sense, Shinran’s perspective is more analogous to that of Dōgen than we may have usually imagined. For Shinran, one cannot generate ōjō by means of the practice of nembutsu. Much less can one use the practice of nembutsu to generate a personal transformation that constitutes jōbutsu. To assume so would be to assume that a foolish little mortal like you or me could, in this very life, do what Amitābha did. Amitābha, through lifetimes of diligent practice as a bodhisattva, experienced jōbutsu. Having learned from his own personal experience how long and arduous that path always is, Amitābha vowed to extend the salvific power of his own buddhahood to all sentient beings whose consciousness is fully opened to it. And it is within that conceptual
Kirkland: Transforming Reality through Vocalization 157 framework that all nembutsu practice must be situated in the Shin Pure Land tradition. So the vocalization of salvific truth in Shin practice is ultimately quite reminiscent of the Ling-pao model of early medieval Taoists: the practitioner’s soteriological success is ultimately dependent upon the salvific power of a great cosmic being, who has revealed himself (or, in the case of Yüan-shih T’ien-tsun in the Tu-jen ching, possibly “herself”) and has offered us all an opportunity to connect oneself and engage oneself in that being’s salvific power by means of properly focused vocalization. That practice, in each case, is not a matter of experiencing some kenshō, some new awareness of the nature of one’s own reality. Nor does it result in the practitioner experiencing jōbutsu: the Ling-pao Taoist practitioner does not actually become Yüan-shih T’ien-tsun, just as the Shin Pure Land practitioner certainly does not transform him- or herself into a being comparable in nature to Amida. Nor does he or she somehow transform his or her own nature in such a way that he or she becomes merged or identified with Amida. Further comparative analysis of the soteriological models found in these interrelated religious traditions may result not only in greater insights into all of them, but also in a greater appreciation of the uniqueness of Shinran’s thought within an extremely rich and varied context of religious thought.
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Shigaraki: The Meaning of Practice
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